Mari lugs two heavy suitcases into the office and heaves them into the corner. “Where’s yours?” she asks me.

I point to a half-filled garbage bag.

“That’s all you got?”

“I’ve never done this before.”

She tsks at my inexperience. “You’ve got to fill it up!” She takes her cubicle’s photos and cuts out her husband with scissors as sharp as her curses last week, when she found his secret texts. She dumps the massacred pictures into one of her suitcases, along with a snow globe from their Saint Croix vacation. Finally, she tosses in an empty vase for good measure.

“Clean sweep,” she says dramatically. She eyes my garbage bag. “Seriously, you couldn’t find more stuff?”

I scrunch down in my chair. “It felt sort of… wrong.”

I’d searched my apartment this morning for regrets. The advertisements for the Build-a- Grudge store say preparing to visit one is just like a good house cleaning, but that’s not exactly true. More like cleaning cobwebs with your bare finger. Unsettling.

“Why does it feel wrong?” Mari asks me. “What’s Gabe done for you lately anyway?”

“He’s a good guy.”

Mari snorts. She’s never even met him. She’s only heard me say, “I’d wish he’d—” too many times.

***

At lunch we go to the mall, to the Build-a-Grudge store. She makes a big show of her suitcases, huffing and angling up her elbows. A woman by the pretzel shop gives her a thumbs-up and shouts, “You go, girl!”

The pretzels smell great, but Mari warns me off. “Don’t eat. You want to be hangry when you do this.”

Inside the store, she upends her suitcases’ contents into a vat churning with agitation. Her shredded pictures, snow globe, and vase fall in first. Then clothes, books, old concert tickets, and dark clouds. It spins with lightning crackles, with the fury of a woman scorned.

Next to this vat, golden tokens spill out of a dispenser. It’s like a slot machine’s cacophony of jackpots and false promises.

“Woo-hoo! Your turn.”

I throw in three of Gabe’s shirts, the coffee maker he swore he’d fix last year, and a handful of foggy misgivings. They slither out in gray wisps, more like sighs than anger. When I dump the rest of the bag in, the vat coughs politely and gives me two tokens, as if embarrassed on my behalf.

Mari moves over to a glass fronted machine. She inserts her tokens and works a foot pedal. Fluff rains down in the windowed box. It reminds me of the dust-bunnies under the bed that Gabe promised he’d vacuum but never did.

She then moves to a skin-machine and grips a brass wheel like she’s steering a listing ship. Her grudge’s stuffing gets covered with green, warty fabric. Like bubbling bile.

“Excellent!” she grins.

My stuffing gets wrapped in terrycloth, all cocoa-colored and soft. The color of Gabe’s hair. It’s actually kind of cute.

“You’ve got to concentrate,” she says. “You’re not making a teddy bear. This is serious.”

“I’m trying!”

She moves to the eyeball station. Her grudge gets mean, jealous eyes. Mine are googly.

We hold our noses by the scent machine. Hers gets smells of cheap perfume, nasty sheets, and sweat. Mine’s like a mildewing shower. I had wanted more help around the apartment when I started night classes.

We step around a gaggle of little kids at a machine, hard at work building a grudge that looks like a hydra-headed mean mom.

Mari shakes her head. “Just wait until you have kids. No one holds a grudge like an eight-year-old. Oh, except them. Teenagers are the worst.”

She points outside to where young girls drift by Hot Topic. They watch us with narrowed eyes, covered in body glitter and applying lip gloss. Way too cool for this store.

I try to stay angry at Gabe, but I keep coming up with things I’ve done wrong too. When his father died last year, did I do enough? What if he’s been depressed?

The sound machine gives Mari’s grudge squelches and wet slaps. Mine barks.

“We were going to get a dog,” I explain sheepishly.

When we’re done, her grudge looks like a fat gremlin with tentacles. Mine’s like a drunk monkey. Both of ours have Velcro straps so we can hoist them on our backs. When Mari walks, her grudge makes meaty thwacks like two people humping.

She places it on a weight machine by the exit. “Fifteen pounds!” she says proudly. “Spite weighs a lot.”

Mine barely registers.

“Seriously?” she asks. “What about all your talk about Gabe not listening? Not paying attention to you?”

“I know, right?” I try to work up my anger. My grudge’s head tilts on its floppy neck, like it’s listening. “But maybe if we had just talked more—”

“Oh please. Men don’t talk.” Mari points to the store next door. It’s a new franchise of Eat Your Feelings. Full buffet, all you can eat, open 24-7, and sure enough, there are a lot of men in there. Maybe their wives are in the Served Cold revenge store next to Sears, but those windows are too frosty for me to see through.

“Come on. We’re done here.” Mari tosses all her empty luggage cases into a bin labeled “Old Baggage.” Then we walk out past the dating store, where people wear hearts on their sleeves. Past the Chips-Ahoy, where folks come out strutting like admirals with chips the size of epaulets on their shoulders.

We walk past the Bone to Pick kiosk. The 20/20 Hindsight optical store. The row of discount lawyers’ offices. I really want to stop at the Tough Cookies store and get one of their giant chocolate chips, but Mari’s grudge is squelching, moaning, and smacking so much that two moms cover their kids’ ears.

Back at work, Mari sets her grudge down with an exaggerated “omph.”

“Wow,” says someone from Accounting. “That’s… impressive.”

Sympathetic tongue-clicks follow, the workplace equivalent of applause. Someone even brings her a coffee. Now everybody knows that Mari can carry a serious grudge. Nobody is cutting in front of her in the copy queue.

Even our boss compliments her. And she’s been super nice since one of the temps built a grudge that looks just like her and demands overtime.

So I suppose grudges are good things?

But my grudge’s head flops. Its googly eyes stare straight through me. I hide it in a drawer where it barks once, then starts to disintegrate.

***

Later, I go to the Build-a-Grudge store to try again. This time, I think of things I did wrong with Gabe.

The machine whirs. I get so many tokens that they spill through my fingers. I crawl around the floor in supplication, picking them up.

This time, the machine makes lots of stuffing. Self-accusing button eyes. Guilt. Reproach. The bitter-sweet whiff of missed opportunities.

When it’s finished, it looks a lot like me. I hoist it on my back, and it’s so weighty, I nearly fall over. With each painful step, I know exactly what I’d do differently.

I take it to the office, and Mari shakes her head in disbelief. “That’s not how it works,” she says. “You don’t do you.”

I shrug. “My first one sort of disappeared.”

She arches an eyebrow.

“I like this one better. It’s mine. It’s me, not Gabe.”

“Are you serious? You’re literally saying, ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ with this thing.”

“But what if it was me?”

“Whatever.” She carries her grudge to the copy room. It squelches and makes its slappy sounds along the way, moaning like R-rated betrayal. People practically fall out of their cubicles to look.

After work, I hoist my grudge on my shoulders. I walk down the street, past the library, and through the park, where Gabe and I first met. Finally, I totter into our neighborhood grocery store. My shoulders ache and my back screams, but I don’t care. When I shuffle to the produce aisle, bam!

There he is.

His cart has soup for one and Tums. He looks terrible. He’s hunched over, wearing a build-a-grudge too. And—surprise—it looks exactly like him, right down to the slouch. It smells like stale coffee and regret.

He sees me.

“Hey,” he nods.

“Hey.”

My grudge chooses this moment to unravel. A button-eye plinks off and rolls under the cabbages, where it stares up at us in wonder. Under the fluorescent lights, Gabe and I both look older than we should, bent under the weight of all the things we should’ve said sooner.

But then the vegetables’ misting system turns on with a green-song smell of fresh spring rain. It smells like cucumbers and second chances.

“I’m sorry,” we blurt out at the same time.

We step forward to hug. To embrace. To feel each other’s heartbeats against our own once again.

But first, we lay our burdens down.

———-

Joy Kennedy-O’Neill teaches English at a small college on the Texas Gulf Coast. Her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Galaxy’s Edge, the Lascaux Prize Anthology, the Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. More of her work can be found at JoyKennedyOneill.com. “Build-a-Grudge” was first published in Daily Science Fiction.